DLers in the know: what was the behind the scenes gossip of “Will and Grace”?

It all boiled down to Mullaly hating Debra Messing.

Anastasia was deeply obsessed with her and other people’s Beaverhausen.

The beaver got the house.

Isn’t there going to be another season of the reboot?

BORING

Strong will, missing grace

Megan basically said on her podcast that Deb “bullied” her.

Reboot canceled right?

Rebooted W&G aired its final new episode in April 2020.

Meghan was the Kim Cattrall of the group.

The worst was the when the producers gave that interview that confirmed they didn’t get along but said it was a “private matter” that “shouldn’t effect the show”

Mullally was accusing someone at her work of bullying her.

That isn’t a “disagreement” or “private matter” and those producers were shitty at their job for not protecting every cast member whatever the facts were

What did the bullying consist of?

P.S. Let me tell you about Deb Messing....

Rumor had it that Sean Hayes was gay IRL!

Really amazing how good Mullally looks.

That really sucks for Meghan. I wonder what the root of the feud was.

Maybe Debra was pissed at how good Megan looked for the reboot and how bad she looked. There was something off about her makeup and this was even before she played pregnant. I thought maybe she was pregnant again in real life but apparently not.

I knew Megan (slightly) in college—hard to believe she could feel bullied—she had a very strong (and merited) ego even then.

A (straight) friend of mine worked on the show for several years. He told me Sean Hayes was the only nice one among the regular cast. he said the first few years Debra Messing was so vain and insecure he and many of the other people who worked on the show couldn't stand her, nor could most of the other people who worked on the show (she was so obsessed with her hair she would have three people work just on it during the breaks when they filmed before a studio audience, which is apparently beyond the pale for a sitcom). He also said Megan Mullally could be very funny, but he thought she was as much of a drunk in real life as Karen Walker is. And he said Eric McComrack is a cold snide man.

He also told me no one liked Shelley Morrison (Rosario), although he never explained why.

He told me he did very much like Leslie Jordan, whom he found sweet and usually easy to get along with.

Crew called Debra “Debra is a mess-ing.”

Bullying is so vague. I wish Mullally had just said, “I hate her because she’s a bitch to everyone” but I guess she’s not a victim in that scenario. Anyhow, Deb and her infamous cunt attitude cost them all millions. That reboot would have run at least another short season.

*I will add though: my friend has worked with Debra Messing since, and has said she's grown up enormously (her divorce from Daniel Zelman and raising children has made her a nicer, less neurotic, and less self-obsessed person, he said).

Funny show. I loved it. So well-written. I wish it would come back again.

That proved to be a false rumor R14.

He and his lovely wife share a split level home in Great Neck with their three beautiful children.

Didn’t Shelley Morrison have cancer during the run of the show? Maybe that made her disagreeable to everyone.

[quote]He also told me no one liked Shelley Morrison (Rosario), although he never explained why.

It was obvious no one liked her even from her brief appearance in one of the blooper reels. I’d love to know why tho.

Deb Messing is showing these huge teeth somewhere as this thread turns on Shelley Morrison.

Apparently, Shelley ran to the press and leaked the news that Meghan and Nick are getting married, because Meghan didn't invite her to the wedding (it was a private, family affair).

Megan must have had her allies because she was gifted with getting to sing two songs on the show which I actually found out of character for Karen. eg. The Man That Got Away. It must have stuck in Debra's craw because of all the times they made fun of her singing.

Maybe Morrison had been ‘dressingroomlifting’ their personal items.

R19

For some reason, McCormack being cold and snide rings true to me, and I barely know anything about the man.

Well, for the first few seasons everyone said Will & Grace should have been called Jack & Karen. No wonder DM was freaking out. Her character was annoying, not funny. Her lines were subpar. Nobody cared if she lived or died. It got better later but there's no question that someone else (Karen) was walking away with her show and no leading lady was going to put up with that and let it go.

Yeah, I think it was a one-sided Cybill (Shepherd) vs. Christine (Baranski) type of rivalry.

In the first episode that had Karen, she wasn’t the squeaky voiced substance abuser she became later. She was more of a snooty, bored Upper East Side matron and used her regular speaking voice. Deb probably thought she was going to use that characterization throughout the show.

I never thought Jack and Karen stole the show. They could be funny but they were also too mean. I always felt Debra was the heart of the show and had a real gift for physical comedy. But the reboot made some strange choices for her - like having her wear a body suit for a pole dance in the strip club and declaring this is how a real woman looks. That's hard to save.

r35 = Debra

People kept comparing Deb to Lucille Ball. I never saw it personally.

Did Debra have a coke problem?

I did r37. I really do agree with those her liked her for her physical comedy. She did seem very good at that.

It always does seem so pathetic with things like this, where everybody just needs to dial the cunting down to 1 or 2 so everyone could get through a couple of seasons and make a ton of money, but I guess for some that is just an impossible task.

Deborah‘s acting was kind of OneNote. Her character was the heart of the show, but her acting certainly didn’t live up to that position.

Team Debra

R37 - When they did the Lucy tribute show I liked Debra's version of the commercial the best, even funnier than the original though I can't find footage of the Lucy scene to attach.

R15 a face transplant will do that for ya!

Will & Grace was the best comedy show of the past 25-30 years.

To be honest, for the longest time, I thought the Megan vs. Debra drama was just silly PR drama to create buzz for the show. I was kind of crushed when it turned out to be true since I like both. And yeah, I come out as a fan of Debra's crime show, The Mysteries of Laura.

Eric never seemed generally cold or snide in any of the behind-the-scenes footage or blooper reels, or even in any of the red carpet interviews at the Emmys or Golden Globes... And the Globes is where celebs get drunk and let their facades drop a tad.

But I can definitely see him being cold and snide to a particular person he doesn't care for or respect.

Will & Grace was a passable comedy. It came at a time when there was nothing but shit on tv, which made it look excellent in comparison. The same goes for the shitastic Friends.

One of his many silly interviews, Leslie Jordan was asked about the reboot, and he basically said "I had so much fun being able to tag team with Megan Mullally again." Nothing else about the others, or the show, etc.

Recent reunion

Wasn't Leslie Jordan's character mostly associated with Karen?

Yeah, they were rivals/sometimes frenemies. She would make gay jokes about him and he would make fun of her drinking/himself.

So it would make sense that LJ would call out Megan but not the others.

Yeah, just based on logistics. It was mostly them in tete a tetes.

[quote]Will & Grace was the best comedy show of the past 25-30 years.

Horseshit.

^ Sarah Jessica Parker

When Debra won her Emmy the others seemed pleased.

Every hot looking comedic actress wanted to emulate Lucille Ball.

And by Amy I don’t mean Schumer, although she kept referring herself as a hot blonde in her stand up Schlick.

And they all failed.

I get Debra , Fran & Cybill.

Who the f are the rest?

[quote] Every hot looking comedic actress wanted to emulate Lucille Ball

And frankly they should have aimed higher - but I won’t get into that necessarily.

Will and Grace and Karen and Jack.

In that clip at r57, Deb's hair back then was at least a believable shade of brown. In recent years it's looked like she uses the same dye for her hair as Crayola uses in making Burnt Sienna crayons.

I always got the impression Eric resented playing a gay man and just did it for the money

Sean Hayes doesn't thank the cast.

Obviously they got along "ok" during the original show and something happened during the reboot

r65

IDT Eric is really straight, thus the turmoil.

Debra Messing was “coke mom” in several blind items.

I ran into her and Eric separately and they both acted like they were momentarily alarmed to be recognized (as if a riot would break out - I could care less).

The scuttlebutt is that this was a sitcom about a gay lawyer living with a straight woman in Manhattan, with hijinks ensuing. The tea is that it ran for eleven seasons.

But you didn’t hear that from me and don’t ask me for my name! I’ll just go by “industry insider.”

Several are repeated here

They seem fine on Ellen.

r72 Just because they SEEM fine doesn't mean they ARE fine!

It’s called ACTING!!!

Megan Mullally saved the show. Without her inventing Karen they would never have lasted beyond the second season.

Will and Grace merely had a good time slot. That's why it succeeded.

R75 Meg Mullally was the only good thing about that show, and she rightly got a lot of attention for the role and her take on it. I can't imagine there wasn't tension on the set due to her character being massively more popular than the other three. And both Messing and McC come across as envious types. Hayes was cute, but his portrayal of a gay man got really old a couple seasons in.

Without Jack and Karen, I can't imagine how boring that show would have been. I always hated the way the characters of Will and Grace were presented as some sort of non-sexual pseudo-"romantic" couple.

Jack and Karen were more fun because they were presented as a gay man and his hag, and that relationship was better off for it.

That show was nothing without Mullaly as Karen. As another poster said, it wouldn't have lasted more than one season without her.

R41 If by heart you mean she was the least funny and least talented. She was always a super annoying cunt. She couldn't match even one cunt lip of Meghan's.

I watched mainly for Karen, but a whole show of her would have gotten tiring fast. You need the boring "straight" characters like Will and Grace to ground the show. What was so fantastic about the show was how well everyone worked as an ensemble. That chemistry is impossible to fake and it's the same reason Friends, Frasier, and all the other big sitcoms worked. You can not want to socialize with someone off set, but as long as the chemistry is still there, it'll work.

I have no inside info but it isn't at all unusual for the star of a show to get upset when a costar gets better lines and more laughs than the star and the star ends up being the straight person for the funny lines.

Like the show or hate it, Will & Grace helped make gays more acceptable to conservative America, not enough but more than before.

Really it just made pill popping alcoholic rich New York housewives more acceptable to conservative America

I loved the original show and the reboot and each cast member. Yes, Karen was a gem and hysterically funny, but that was her character. And yes, Megan Mullally is very talented, but they all were in their own way. Yes, Karen was priceless. But Grace was also a riot just in a different way, not as hysterical as Karen, but pretty damn funny. Jack was funny and great at having the craziest lines and making them work. Will was the least funny of all of them, but of course, a necessary member of the cast.

I don't understand why some of you complement Karen so much--and believe me, I agree with you--she was the best. But that doesn't mean that Grace was a piece of shit. Grace was very funny. Some of you just don't like Debra Messing as a person, and I don't know why.

I love Deb.

I love Debra

Debra is a national treasure.

I never found Grace to be funny. More annoying than funny. Debra was the Sarah Jessica Parker of W&G.

R83 That is the stupidest thing to say. A lame neoliberal show like WaG never changed anyone's minds about gays. Just like all the shows about blacks never made a racist love them. Jesus fuck, youse stupid.

R90 is a bitter queen. Wow.

LOL. Maybe brain dead turds like you, dummy.

r83 r85 r86 r87 = Deb Messing

Eric always looked happier than the rest because he was busy getting as much tail as possible, and women (tons of them) were all too happy to give it to him.

Megan and Nick are assholes.

I remember hearing reports of Megan having a frosty relationship with crew, not wanting to come out to bow to the audience after taping with the others, etc. Whatever started the feud between her and Debra, she was the only one of the four who appeared to lack professionalism and hate the working environment. I don't think blame for that can be laid at Debra's feet.

There are reasons the premise would never have worked on Broadway.

Yes, Karen was the best thing on the show, but having to act for years with Karen Walker being the center of attention mustn’t have been easy. Not saying Mullany was to blame for it of course.

However, those lame vague comments of hers about being bullied are awful, i hate that level of passive-agressive, unfollowings on instagram. It is all very seventeenish. Damn, you are sixty, either have the guts to tell all or shut up.

Karen introduced me to martinis and marrying for wealth. I will always be grateful. 🙏

Years ago I had an acting teacher in Chicago who worked with Mullaley on an independent film before Will and Grace and she said Mullalley was 'difficult.'

The part that Leslie Jordan played was originally written for Joan Collins. Collins read the script and didn't think she could play a character that mean.

1. Really glad Collins turned it down.

2. Collins couldn't play mean? Huh.

Nick and Meghan always gave me the impression they would be swingers

Collins would have done very well as the female Leslie Jordan. I wonder who they would have cast as her Associate Benji.

Yes, Megan was also a pain in the ass on the China Beach set.

Here's the Joan Collins story.

For me there was often a mean-spiritedness that undermined the comedy on the show. Friends don't act like that otherwise they would not stay friends.

I have a hard time thinking that Millay was truly bullied—when she was a freshman from Oklahoma she entered Northwestern and took over the joint from the first quarter MainStage production where she walked away with “A Little Night Music” as Petra—which had a perfectly adequate Desiree and a very wry Suzie Plakson as Charlotte (and Gregg Edelman with a rich baritone and colorless acting as Frederik). But it was Megan’s “Miller’s Son” everyone talked about. I met her socially once—very steely, though not unpleasant.

[quote] there was often a mean-spiritedness that undermined the comedy on the show. Friends don't act like

Like Seinfeld I think that was the point. They were ALL horrible people but had to band together because nobody else would tolerate them for long.

Not one aspect of Wag was realistic. Karen is married to a trillionaire yet works for a titless nobody like Grace? Fuck that. Verisimilitude of Wag was minus a million.

So; passably attractive (more so than Jack or any other cast men) upscale well-heeled successful gay but always tragic, lonely and dependent on an hysterical crazy yenta?

Such a positive role model it was!

This question was relevant back in '98.

I love that because she was a good Petra in a college production, 40 years ago, that precludes her from being bullied by Debra Messging, circa 2019.

The Joan Collins story is interesting. I always assume Beverly Leslie spun off from Christine Ebersole’s character from season three. The scenes between her and Karen were hilarious and had excellent chemistry. I assumed something bad happened behind the scenes that precluded her from coming back. I remember seeing her on an episode of Rosie around the same time and she came across a little nutso. I also think that she may have posed a threat to Mullaly because she was so good in such a similar role.

Beverly Leslie debuted four episodes before Ebersole's character though.

[quote]R100 Years ago I had an acting teacher in Chicago who worked with Mullaley on an independent film before Will and Grace and she said Mullalley was 'difficult.'

A former classmate of mine was married to Mullally (this was pre Will & Grace) and once I called his house, and she answered and said they were not married anymore. I said, “Oh, I’m sorry!”

She assured me it was fine, that there were no hard feelings between them, and gave me his new number.

So, she was nice in that awkward situation. Which is admirable and good natured.

That's a really nice story, r114. Thank you for sharing.

Nosiness about her ex-husband led me to Wikipedia, which led to this tidbit I didn't know. She discovered Bill Hader?

"But in 2003, after a girlfriend dumped him, he impulsively signed up for an improv class at Second City Los Angeles. When the class held its graduation showcase, the “Will & Grace” star Megan Mullally came to see her brother-in-law perform—and was transfixed by Hader. “He wasn’t on another level from the other students,” she said. “He was on another level from people who are really famous for being funny.” Mullally called Lorne Michaels, the creator and executive producer of “Saturday Night Live,” to urge him to give Hader an audition. Hader didn’t do celebrity impressions—he didn’t even have an agent—but he was told to whip up a couple. “Bill ended up doing James Mason and Peter Falk,” Michaels told me, dryly. “So he was obviously completely contemporary.” Michaels hired him anyway."

That's an incredibly nice thing to do for a stranger.

I've told this on other Will and Grace threads but I went to a taping of the show during its original run. It was the Hal Linden boy toy episode from season 6. Messing was pregnant at the time and they shot all her scenes first so she could leave. Mullally was using a cane and had a cast or boot on her foot. The audience went mad for her but she was very reserved and clearly not there to interact with the audience or feed the idea she was anything like Karen in real life. She did her scenes and then retreated to her own space off to the side or behind the sets. Eric McCormick was the most personable of the cast, interacting with the audience and trying to keep things light and fun. It was fun getting to see it live but I admit there was a level of disappointment because I was expecting a different energy from the cast.

Hal Linden spoke about working on the episode and was not a fan of the production but didn't have anything bad to say about the cast. He didn't like the constant rewrites and felt his performance suffered because he could never nail down his character since they were forever changing his lines and spent no time rehearsing.

What is the context of the Cher reference Hal makes?

Checked IMDb - He was a guest on the Cher solo TV series in 1976.

r117 That makes a lot of sense. It's probably why the show could be such a mess at times, especially if they were pulling that crap in the reboot with Debra and Megan's phoned-in performances.

It's hard to believe they only rehearsed once since there was a lot of physical comedy with Sean Hayes in particular.

Megan Mullally is friends with Michael Pollan and came to my workplace looking for him once. Very brief interaction but she was very low key and nice. Just my two cents.

Honey, what’s going on? What’s happening? What’s that?

I was on the show once. I was pretending to be a faggot at an audition. Did you know the guy who played Jack is a faggot in real life? I'm kind of glad I never once used the word faggot on the set.

R124 Matt - remember we don’t use that word in front of the children

Karen and Jack’s micro-jokes on the side are far and away my favorite part of Will and Grace. Example: They were spectating drama and during a lull turned to each other and started saying “Peas and carrots peas and carrots.”

I don't remember peas and carrots but I love the little scene of Jack and Karen taking the piss out of the Wizard of Oz.

The original ending was all four cast members being cast into a wood chipper, to the audience's extreme delight. They shoulda went with that one, cunts.

Bill Hader is purported to have a massive penis; I’m sure that moved his career along, R116.

A Dler posted about his male friend hooking up with Bill Hader and said Hader's dick is huge.

Not to be a hater but Hader is fucking ugly and has a wonky eye. Who cares about his meat. Yuck.

I care about Hader’s one-eyed monster.